Warsaw marks 70 years since uprising in ghetto

By VANESSA GERA, Associated Press

Friday, April 19, 2013

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Sirens wailed and church bells tolled in Warsaw as largely Roman Catholic Poland paid homage Friday to the Jewish fighters who rose up 70 years ago against German Nazi forces in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

The mournful sounds marked the start of state ceremonies that were led by Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes to honor the first large-scale rebellion against the Germans during World War II. The president was joined by officials from Poland, Israeli and beyond as well as a survivor of the fighting, Simha Rotem.

“We knew that the end would be the same for everyone, but we wanted to choose the kind of death we would die,” said Rotem, an 88-year-old who one in a tiny number of surviving fighters and the key figure at the ceremony. “But to this day I have doubts as to whether we had the right to carry out the uprising and shorten the lives of people by a day, a week, or two weeks. No one gave us that right and I have to live with my doubts.”

During a morning of ceremony, Komorowski bestowed one of the country’s highest honors on Rotem — the Grand Cross of the Order of the Rebirth of Poland. Later the two of them, along with Israeli Education Minister Shai Piron and Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a Polish Auschwitz survivor who helped rescue Jews during the war, walked side-by-side to the monument and bowed before it as soldiers laid a wreath for them.

Officials had announced that a second surviving fighter, Havka Folman Raban, would participate but she was not highlighted in television coverage and it was unclear whether she actually was there.

To a military drum, other dignitaries followed them in paying their respects at the now famous memorial, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, members of Poland’s Jewish community and U.S. Ambassador Stephen Mull along with an American survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, Estelle Laughlin.

Rabbis also recited mournful Hebrew prayers, flanked as they stood by three Polish army chaplains, a Catholic, an Eastern Orthodox and a Protestant, one of whom recited Psalm 130. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! ...” it starts.

Throughout Warsaw, national and city flags fluttered from city buses, trams and public buildings as authorities made an unprecedented effort to encourage Poles to remember the ghetto fighters and Jewish suffering during the war. Warsaw city hall said it is the first time that churches in the capital rang their bells to mark the anniversary of the uprising.

The events come exactly 70 years after about 750 Jews with few arms and no military training attacked a much larger and well equipped German force, which was about to send the remaining survivors of the ghetto to death camps. The revolt was crushed in May, and the ghetto was razed to the ground, most of its residents killed.

“The Nazis made a hell on earth of the ghetto,” Komorowski said in a speech. “Persecuting the Jews appealed to the lowest of human instincts.”

The events Friday followed an evening of commemorations. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta, performed works by Beethoven in Warsaw’s Grand Theater in honor of the fighters — a gala event attended by Komorowski, Tusk and Rotem. Before the concert, a cantor appeared on a stage whose set evoked the brick ghetto walls and windows with painted burning flames that recalled the ghetto as the Nazis burned it to the ground. The audience also gave Rotem a long standing ovation.

Later, a less formal event took place around the ghetto memorial, beginning with the Israeli orchestra’s first violinist Julian Rachlin performing a Bach sarabande, followed by more music and speeches.

Israel also marked the anniversary of the uprising on its Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 7, which coincides with the Hebrew date of the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

———AP reporter Monika Scislowska in Warsaw contributed to this report.